Back Issues: General Kuo’s Chicken

In this week’s issue, Calvin Trillin writes about the devoted followers of the Chinese chef Peter Chang. In the nineteen-sixties, the New Yorker writer John McCarten was a devoted patron of the Lichee Tree restaurant, on East Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. McCarten published three Talk stories over a span of four years about the Lichee Tree. In the first story, McCarten introduces the restaurant’s proprietors, Kuo Chi-chih and his wife. Kuo was a general under Chiang Kai-shek before emigrating to the U.S. and going into the restaurant business. The second and third stories, published in 1963 and 1964, describe Chinese New Year celebrations at the restaurant, one of which featured an appearance by Rocky Marciano, who offered to “fight anybody in the house.” With the Chinese New Year having just passed, however, I’d prefer to focus on Mme. Kuo’s parting speech, from the 1963 story:

A final word on the New Year. It is a time to clean house, a time to cleanse our souls, a time to repay our debts, a time to pay respects to our ancestors and friends, a time to have only goodness in our hearts toward all members of the human race.

The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.